Latest addition to the Black Tin Barns album on bandcamp.
This song is about the slow decline and eventual closure of the British Leyland Rover factory in Cowley.
My Uncle John worked in the spray booths there and my father would drive past it almost every day .
By the early 1990s the once proud Morris Motors and Pressed Steel plants were either crumbling or being demolished or sold to BMW.
Thatcherite propagandists in the press had a field day destroying its reputation and shoddy working practices at all levels produced a series of bad cars but it also had a long history of union activism and government opposition meaning it like the mines ripe for closure by a right wing establishment.
The early 1990s were marked by a series of ‘joyride’ incidents*. Basically disenfranchised youth venting anger at no jobs and no hope. Cars would be stolen, joy ridden and burnt…it happened everywhere but nowhere more poignantly than in Blackbird Leys estate…the side of Oxford that never seen. I was more interested and attached to that part than any dreaming spires.
So this is my sad elegy to a now destroyed community and way of life.
Ironically I have never learnt to drive but write a lot about cars….maybe if I had I’d be Bruce Springsteen now!
Here images of it as it was..
HERE wikipedia on the Joyriding days..seems I spot on sadly…
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_Leys
1991 street disturbances
Following a crackdown by police on joyriding in September 1991, some 150 youths stoned police officers. Two women suffered stab wounds and two men suffered other injuries during the riots.[8]
Around this time, Blackbird Leys was infamous for its joy riding. Young men from the estate would steal cars and ‘display’ them (with a variety of high-speed stunts) to an audience gathered outside the estate shops (known locally as the ‘top shops’), eventually gaining worldwide media attention.[9][not in citation given] Politician Andrew Smith stated in 1991 that the extensive national media coverage of confrontations with the police in August and September left many of the wider public with a distorted picture of the problem.[10] Some say journalists visiting helped encourage some of the action for filming.[9] Various measures were brought in by the local council and police to stop the displays. Police often found it difficult to catch joy riders, whose stolen cars were faster than the police vehicles, though eventually a faster police car was introduced. Chicanes were built around the shops area, and an anti-skid surface applied to the road, making it difficult to execute handbrake turns and other stunts.
